But the Pentagon that sent them into war already has more money than it did during the George W Bush or the Ronald Reagan build-up years. And more money than the next seven countries put together. Besides, what will the military do with all that extra money?

It’s hard to say, because the Defence Department’s accounting systems are so poor that it’s the only federal agency that still can’t pass an audit. Its own Defence Business Board identified $125bn (£100.8bn) in Pentagon waste without breaking a sweat — though the Pentagon made sure to bury this report.

I’m suspicious of the $54 billion figure on other grounds, too. It happens to be 10 per cent of the current budget.

Did they arrive at this number based upon careful consideration of threats and the necessary tools to respond to them? Or did they come up with a nice big, round number to throw at the Pentagon and let them figure out how to spend it?

I think it’s the latter and that doesn’t make me feel safer.

Now let’s look at where they want to cut. Start with the State Department, whose total budget ($29bn) is dwarfed by the extra money they want to give to the Pentagon.

More than 100 retired generals recently put out a statement saying that cutting the diplomacy budget is a bad idea that threatens our security. After all, we’re more likely to go to war if we’re depriving ourselves of the tools to avoid it.

As general Jim Mattis put it back in 2013: “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.” Mattis now heads the Pentagon.

The same day Trump was telling Congress he’d protect our air and water, he was axing a Barack Obama administration clean water rule.

Another common source of anxiety and anger is the feeling you’ve been ripped off by some bank or retailer and there’s nothing you can do about it. Let’s watch those feelings multiply if the administration succeeds in zeroing out the budget for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Speaking at the bank in London on 26 May, Mrs May went further than her public remarks to explain the economic benefits of staying in the EU, telling staff it was time the UK took a lead in Europe and that she hoped voters would look to the future rather than the past.

British Prime Minister Theresa May once warned her fellow Conservatives of the perils of being known as the “nasty party.” But after 100 days in office, she is in danger of going further, turning the United Kingdom into the nasty country: here.

USA: Phil Murphy, the front-runner in New Jersey’s Democratic gubernatorial primary, faces new questions about his tenure at Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs with the election just days away. The campaign of attorney Jim Johnson, Murphy’s closest competitor in the race, criticized Murphy for serving as president of Goldman Sachs Asia at a time when the division profited from an investment in Yue Yuen Industrial, a Taiwan-based shoemaker. Human rights groups claim to have documented widespread labor abuses by Yue Yuen, including the company docking workers’ already modest pay for mistakes and running factories where machines sometimes severed workers’ hands and fingers, according to an NJ Advance Media report: here.

Former European Union Commission President Barroso in more trouble yet

Today, 14:46

The contacts of José Manuel Barroso to the investment bank Goldman Sachs date back to the time when he was still President of the European Commission. That’s earlier than he had admitted. Barroso will now work for the US bank as a consultant.

The contacts appear from correspondence between Barroso and Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, which is in the hands of the Portuguese newspaper Publico.

Barroso, according to the newspaper, during his presidency (November 2004 – November 2014) already had non-minuted meetings with people from the bank.

Elated

In an email of September 30, 2013 Blankfein thanks Barroso for their “productive talks” and he says that partners of the bank were delighted with the “extraordinarily fruitful meetings”. According to the newspaper executives of the bank have made on a confidential basis suggestions for changes in European policies, which were read by Mr Barroso’s cabinet with “great interest”.

One of Barroso’s advisers, according to the newspaper, was reluctant to record meetings between his boss and the bank in the European Commission’s books. Registration of such meetings was not mandatory at that time.

…

Research

Barroso was discredited when it was announced that he had accepted a job at Goldman Sachs, while he should not have done consulting work with such a company after his political career according to the rules of the EC. The current committee chairman Juncker suggested this month an inquiry into the appointment, after fuss had been created about the case. Barroso may lose his pension rights.

However, Barroso’s EU pension money, though a lot, is little compared to the money he gets from Goldman Sachs.

Donald Trump now looks like the front-runner to be the Republican candidate for the US presidency. One of his big appeals is his business success – and his claim that his wealth means he can’t be bought and sold. But there’s evidence which not only casts doubt on Trump‘s wealth claims – but also reveals his history of business relationships with figures connected to organised crime. John Sweeney reports.

Billionaire Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, announced Thursday that hedge fund boss Steven Mnuchin had agreed to become his national finance chairman for the general election campaign. Mnuchin will be tasked with raising as much as $1 billion for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee.

The decision marks a shift in Trump’s campaign operations, which have largely self-funded and have relied more on free media coverage than paid advertisements. As of the latest reports filed with the Federal Election Commission, the Trump campaign has spent about $48 million, of which $36 million came from a series of loans from the candidate, which could be repaid from future contributions. The remaining $12 million came from individual contributions.

The choice of Mnuchin is a demonstration of the cynical doubletalk that has become a trademark of the Trump campaign. While posturing as the defender of those devastated by the Wall Street crash and the dismal-to-nonexistent economic “recovery” under Obama, Trump has brought in as his finance chairman a Wall Street figure closely tied to the mass evictions and foreclosures that were characteristic of the subprime mortgage collapse.

“Steven is a professional at the highest level with an extensive and very successful financial background,” Trump said in a statement. “He brings unprecedented experience and expertise to a fundraising operation that will benefit the Republican Party and ultimately defeat Hillary Clinton.” Actually, Mnuchin’s “experience” includes making financial contributions to Hillary Clinton for both her US Senate and presidential campaigns.

Mnuchin was a partner for 17 years at Goldman Sachs, the biggest and most influential Wall Street investment bank, which has supplied top Washington officials for decades, including the Treasury secretaries in the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

During his tenure at Goldman Sachs, Mnuchin contributed liberally to the campaigns of Hillary Clinton for US Senate in 2000 and 2006. He continued to support Clinton in her first presidential bid, giving the maximum of $2,300 in 2007. …

Like most Wall Street figures—and Trump himself—Mnuchin cultivated politicians in both parties, giving contributions to Republicans Rudy Giuliani, Steve Forbes and Mitt Romney, as well as Democrats including John Edwards, Charles Schumer, Al Gore and John Kerry. …

After leaving Goldman Sachs in 2009, Mnuchin moved to Los Angeles and launched OneWest Bank Group LLC, serving as president and CEO for six years, with significant financial backing from a group of billionaires including George Soros, a longtime backer of the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton. The bank was sold last year to CIT Group for $3.4 billion.

Mnuchin also opened a hedge fund, Dune Capital, which provided financing for several top-grossing Hollywood films, including Avatar, several iterations of the X-Men franchise, and the hideous pro-war film American Sniper.

As a banker, Trump’s new fundraising chief made a specialty of targeting the most vulnerable sections of borrowers, including the elderly and racial minorities. Among the facts reported in the press over the past 24 hours are the following:

· According to a judge in Long Island, OneWest Bank engaged in “harsh, repugnant and repulsive” acts in attempting to evict a couple from their home around Thanksgiving. In 2009 the judge erased $525,000 in mortgage debt as a penalty. He also called the bank’s conduct “inequitable, unconscionable, vexatious and opprobrious.”

· OneWest attempted to foreclose on an 89-year-old widow in California, Irene Jones, who said that the stress of repeated foreclosure threats had contributed to her husband’s depression and subsequent death.

· The bank changed the locks on a Minnesota woman, Leslie Park, during a blizzard, during which she returned home and discovered she could not gain shelter in her own home.

· The California Reinvestment Coalition found that OneWest’s reverse mortgage servicing subsidiary Financial Freedom was responsible for 39 percent of reverse mortgage foreclosures, although it held only 17 percent of the market for reverse mortgages, which are primarily contracted with the elderly. OneWest was thus foreclosing its elderly customers at twice the average rate.

· Of the 35,877 foreclosures the bank carried out over a six-year period in California, more than two-thirds took place in neighborhoods that were more than 50 percent nonwhite—black, Hispanic or Asian.

· In 2011, Mnuchin encountered “protests on the lawn of his Bel Air mansion by foreclosed homeowners angered at his lender’s handling of soured mortgages,” according to Bloomberg.

All in all, a record that explains the mutual attraction between the financier and the political con-man who is about to become the Republican presidential nominee, posing as the advocate of the downtrodden and dispossessed.

Trump accepted the endorsement of the West Virginia Coal Association, the very body that has directed the attack on the jobs, pensions and safety conditions of the state’s miners: here.

As it becomes increasingly likely that Donald Trump will be the Republican presidential candidate in the autumn, concern is growing in European capitals over the consequences. The fact that Trump’s ascendancy is of major international significance is recognised on all sides: here.

Greek debt crisis: Goldman Sachs could be sued for helping hide debts when it joined euro

Exclusive: A leading adviser to debt-riven countries has offered to help Athens recover some of the vast profits made by the investment bank

Jim Armitage and Ben Chu

Saturday 11 July 2015

Goldman Sachs faces the prospect of potential legal action from Greece over the complex financial deals in 2001 that many blame for its subsequent debt crisis.

A leading adviser to debt-riven countries has offered to help Athens recover some of the vast profits made by the investment bank.

The Independent has learnt that a former Goldman banker, who has advised indebted governments on recovering losses made from complex transactions with banks, has written to the Greek government to advise that it has a chance of clawing back some of the hundreds of millions of dollars it paid Goldman to secure its position in the single currency. …

Greece managed to keep within the strict Maastricht rules for eurozone membership largely because of complex financial deals created by the investment bank which critics say disguised the extent of the country’s outstanding debts.

Goldman Sachs is said to have made as much as $500m from the transactions known as “swaps”. It denies that figure but declines to say what the correct one is.

The banker who stitched it together, Oxford-educated Antigone Loudiadis, was reportedly paid up to $12m in the year of the deal. Now Jaber George Jabbour, who formerly designed swaps at Goldman, has told the Greek government in a formal letter that it could “right historical wrongs as part of [its] plan to reduce Greece’s debt”.

Mr Jabbour successfully assisted Portugal in renegotiating complex trades naively done with London banks during the financial crisis. His work helped trigger a parliamentary inquiry and cost many senior officials and politicians their jobs. It also triggered major compensation payments by banks to the Portuguese taxpayer.

Mr Jabbour, who now runs Ethos Capital Advisors, has also helped expose other cases including allegations against Goldman Sachs and Société Générale over their dealings with Libya relating to financial transactions that left the country’s taxpayers billions of dollars out of pocket. Both banks deny wrongdoing.

Based on publicly available information, he believes the size of the profit Goldman made on the transactions was unreasonable. Scrutiny and analysis of the documents and email exchanges could give Greece grounds to seek compensation and assess if the deals were executed for the sole purpose of concealing the country’s debts.

Greece’s membership of the euro gave it access to billions of easy credit which it was then incapable of paying back, leading to its current crisis. Lenders took its euro membership as a stamp of creditworthiness, but the true state of its economy was far less healthy.

Under Ms Loudiadis’s guidance, Goldman swapped debt issued by Greece in dollars and yen for euros which were priced at a historical exchange rate that made the debt look smaller than it actually was. The swaps reportedly made about 2 per cent of Greece’s debt disappear from its national accounts.

The size and structure of the deal enabled the bank to charge a far bigger fee than is usual in swap transactions, and Goldman persuaded Greece not to test the transaction with competitors to ensure it was getting good value for money.

Such deals were not uncommon among smaller countries attempting to enter the eurozone club, but they were stopped by the EU economic statistics agency Eurostat in 2008. Eurostat has said Greece did not report the Goldman Sachs transactions in 2008, when it and other countries were told to restate their accounts.

Two of the men in charge of the debt management agency of Greece at the time have argued the department did not understand what it was buying and lacked the expertise to judge the risks or costs.

One, Christoforos Sardelis, told Bloomberg news agency that Ms Loudiadis offered one swap which had what is known as a “teaser rate”, or three-year grace period. But the Greek official realised three months after signing the deal that it was far more complicated than he first thought – a situation exacerbated by the 9/11 attacks’ downward impact on global interest rates. While Goldman reworked the deal, Greece continued to lose heavily.

Saul Haydon Rowe, a partner at Turing Experts, a team of former bankers who advise in court cases involving bank derivatives, said: “Greece would have to unpick the trades completely and look into what advice was given, and how much Goldman might have expected to make over the course of the transaction.

“For a legal action to go ahead, Greece would have to show that Goldman Sachs said something it knew was untrue or which it did not care was true or not.”

Now that Ted Cruz has officially announced he’s running for president, the seal has been broken and more will quickly follow. Oh, and besides being a presidential candidate, now Senator Cruz will be signing up for Obamacare. Nothing at all hypocritical about that, right? Cruz’s wife is taking a temporary leave from her job at Goldman Sachs so poor ol’ Ted won’t have the health insurance to which he has grown accustomed.

Ted Cruz Welcomes The Endorsement Of Anti-Gay Hate Group Official And Radio Host Sandy Rios: here.

NYT: TED CRUZ FAILED TO DISCLOSE GOLDMAN LOAN IN SENATE RUN “Neither loan appears in reports the Ted Cruz for Senate Committee filed with the Federal Election Commission, in which candidates are required to disclose the source of money they borrow to finance their campaigns.” [NYT]

Airbrushed supermodels, unrealistically skinny celebrities, casual sexism in the media. Why, despite everything, are women still not paid equally or properly represented on corporate boards? These are the questions posed by Melissa Benn in her book What Should We Tell Our Daughters? In this event, filmed live at the 2014 Edinburgh International Book Festival, Benn discusses the latest research with Chloe Combi, and presents a positive manifesto for mothers and daughters.

Sonia Pereiro Mendez was said to have been ‘publicly mocked’ for being a woman – a situation that worsened after she revealed she was expecting a baby

Rob Hastings

Friday 06 March 2015

A top Goldman Sachs banker is suing the firm and three of her bosses, claiming that she was denied millions of pounds in bonuses after she became pregnant.

Sonia Pereiro Mendez was said in a tribunal to have been “publicly mocked” simply for being a woman – a situation that worsened after she revealed she was expecting a baby, resulting in “gratuitous and implicitly derogatory references to her childcare arrangements”.

Ms Pereiro Mendez, an executive director in distressed investing at Goldman who is now pregnant with her second child, is seeking damages from the investment bank for allegedly suffering repeated sex discrimination over the past five years.

She says her salary and bonuses were cut because her employers believed that “given her pregnancy, she was no longer a significant long-term player”, despite doing her best to not let family matters affect her work.

“The claimant took exceptional measures in order to perform the tasks requested of her by Goldman Sachs during her maternity leave,” her claim states.

Ms Pereiro Mendez is also pursuing three superiors – Nicholas Pappas, European head of distressed trading, Simon Morris, global head of credit trading, and Bryan Mix, global head of loan trading – over the claims.

In a preliminary hearing at the Central London Employment Tribunal today, Ms Pereiro Mendez’s legal team detailed how she had been at the company for more than a decade before her then manager, Allen Ukritnukun, started leaving her out of important meetings in 2010.

“He publicly mocked the claimant before certain of her male peers,” her claim says, adding that Mr Ukritnukun “made overtly sexist comments to the claimant including, on one occasion, a comment amounting to explicit sexual harassment.”

After she told colleagues she was pregnant with her first child in October 2011, Ms Pereiro Mendez was “sidelined” and her pay was reduced, she says.

Her basic salary had been set at £250,000 in January 2010 but two years later it was cut to £192,000.

In January 2011 her bonus was £200,000, but she says that employees in her position are entitled to 5 per cent of the profit they bring in, meaning she should have received an additional £910,000.

And in January 2012, after she had disclosed her pregnancy, she was told she would not get a bonus at all, a decision she claims was “discriminatory on the grounds of sex or pregnancy”. She argues she should have received an extra £200,000 in 2013 and £450,000 more in 2014.

…

The case was adjourned until a full hearing next month.

A Goldman Sachs investment banker raped an Irish tourist because he wanted sex on his birthday and “was going to do whatever he had to to get it”, a court has heard: here.